[clusterfoo]

> It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated.

In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing.

Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates.

Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day.

"Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head.

It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen".

It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.

[paganel]

Thank you for this comment, it really put into words things that have been passing through my head constantly in the last couple of months, without me being able to put them down in writing as well as you did.

For example just the other day I (a programmer) was trying to explain to a friend of mine the concept of "Cargo cult programmers" and about how an initially good idea (agile programming) had been taken over and perverted by outside consultants and "professional managers". Said friend works in sales and I think she once mentioned to me the "sell me this pen" thingie.

And about people and institutions still living in the 19th century, I'm now reading a book on the 1830s Saint-Simon movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Simonianism) written by an academia darling, French philosopher Jacques Rancière. I don't know how to put it in words, but to me it seems like Rancière would have preferred for the world to have stopped right then and there, i.e. in the 19th century, when bourgeois people had just taken over from the aristocracy and they could look from above at the peasants and workers that stood below them. He (Rancière) is of course trying to be sympathetic to the workers he writes about in his book, but one feels that he's being sympathetic from outside their world, worse yet, from above their world. More than that, there's this feeling of him mocking their (the workers') belief in an better future and improved social relations, especially when talking about Fourierism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourierism). It reminded me of people who not so long ago were still mocking open source.

And last but not least, and it pains me to say it, but I'm afraid that open data (the idea, the concept) is dead. Somehow the forces that be managed to kill it (I'm thinking Google post-2007 or so, FB since its inception, Twitter in the last couple of years, just to name the biggest). It's strange about how no-one wants to bring this subject up for discussion anymore, it's like a foregone conclusion by now.